Eliciting common Mistakes

English contrasts /iː/- /ɪ/ and /æ/ - /ʌ/ by 49 Catalan/Spanish advanced learners of English (33 females and 16 males, mean age 21) who varied in their starting age of FL (foreign language) learning and FL experience. Some participants began to learn English either in their early childhood (in primary school or in secondary school) and had no extra exposure to the language. Others, aside from learning English through classroom instruction, had access to extra exposure outside the classroom (p.1613).

In order to obtain the learners’ English vowels and consonants perception and production, two tasks were used. The first one was a categorical ABX consonant

discrimination task which according to Music Production Glossary (2018) consists of three sections: section “A” is the original audio source, section “B” is the original audio source with some modification to the signal path or sound quality, and section “X” is the audio that is the same as either “A” or “B”. The second task was a Delayed Sentence Repetition (DSR), which was administered individually in a sound-proof booth. The participants heard

the dialogues over headphones and then were asked to say what they heard, while being recorded. These recordings were later computer-edited for acoustic analysis (Theodorou, Kambanaros, & Grohmann, 2017, para. 1).

Mora and Fullana (2007) analyzed the results on the AXB discrimination task and claimed that “neither starting age (early childhood, primary, and secondary school start) nor experience (school exposure and extra exposure) had a significant effect on the correct discrimination scores for the two vowel contrasts” (p. 1615). In spite of this, late FL learners (secondary school) tended to distinguish /iː/- /ɪ/ and /æ/ - /ʌ/ at higher correct rates than early starters (early childhood and primary school). In addition, Catalan/Spanish speakers with no extra exposure outside school perceived vowel contrasts more accurately than those learners with a higher amount of experience. This unexpected finding might corroborate previous research conducted in both formal and naturalistic settings (p. 1615).

As for the DSR task, participants’ final scores demonstrated that students who did not start to learn English in primary or secondary school and had no extra exposure to the language outside the classroom could not contrast and produce the sounds /iː/- /ɪ/ and /æ/ - /ʌ/ correctly. The authors proposed that experience effects should be further investigated by obtaining rather equal size groups and by addressing input quality rather than quantity (p. 1616).

Furthermore, a study carried out in Japan by Saito (2007) presents a research-based experiment that provides tangible evidence that Japanese learners of English improved their speech production greatly. Among the participants there were six graduate Japanese learners of English (from Syracuse University) who had been in the United States between two and seven months, with a mean age of 26 years old. Four of the Japanese students made up the experimental group that was given phonetic instruction through computer generated visual feedback (IPA symbols and demonstration of tongue movements). An acoustic speech

analysis method was adopted with the computer software “Praat”; that is, “a freeware program for the analysis and reconstruction of acoustic speech signals” (Boersma and Weenink, 1995, para. 1). Additionally, Saito (2007) mentioned that Praat allows the instructor to assess learners’ improvement objectively. On the other hand, the other two students in the control group had no instruction. The results demonstrated that computer- based phonetic instruction effectively provided students with ongoing feedback, which contributed to the improvement of their speech production (pp. 34-35). Explicit phonetic instruction helped these Japanese learners of English significantly improve their segmental phonology in the case of a low front vowel /æ/, since it helped learners become more aware of tongue movements while producing English sounds (pp. 34-35).

These results also showed that Japanese learners of English seem to not separate two demarcated phonetic categories (/ɒ/ and /æ/), which caused intelligibility problems, even though they were advanced learners of English.

There have also been studies that concentrate on gathering the difficulties while producing English vowels. For instance, in Iraq, two different groups of subjects were recruited for a study conducted by Al-Abdely and Yap (2016). The first group consisted of 20 Iraqi EFL learners and the second group of 20 Iraqi English teachers (recruited from three different departments in the University of Anbar: The Education College for Women, the College of Education for Human Sciences and the College of Arts). The 20 Iraqi English teachers, completed the teacher/self-reported assessment questionnaire which aimed to identify, according to teachers’ opinions, learners’ difficulties encountered in the perception of vowels. The second group of subjects (students in the English language department from the Education College for Women in the University of Anbar) were recruited for the

perception test which consisted of 48 real words, four words for each vowel category. All the words were monosyllabic words, except for the four words used to test the schwa sound.

The test results revealed that Iraqi EFL learners had difficulties mainly while producing two vowels categories /ɒ/ and /æ/ and that the perception of the vowels /ɒ/, /ᴧ/, / ɪ/ and /ɔː/ encountered most difficulty. In addition, the insights of Iraqi teachers on which sounds were the most difficult for their EFL learners differed from the actual data revealed since, as these authors claimed, there is usually no conscious awareness of phonetic rules among teachers (p. 13). As a result, Al-Abdely and Yap (2016) claimed that in general Iraq teachers and students believe that English vowels are not easy to learn (p. 13).

2.9.3 Pronunciation Improvement through technology. A classroom study by